Member of the USC WiSE community regularly make headlines for their research and achievements. Please visit the links below for recent news about the WiSE Program and WiSE-affiliated faculty, students and postdoctoral scholars.

Two graduate students, Viviane Ghaderi and Sushmita Allam, win grant to explore the role non-neuron brain cells play in information processing. Success could have profound consequences for drug development.

Viterbi Grad Student Wins First Place in SPE Student Paper Contest. When the winners were announced at a recent Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) meeting in Anaheim, Ph.D. candidate Marjan Jamshidi, a young researcher at the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, pulled out her cell phone to share big news.

Linda Duguay, director of the USC Sea Grant program, has been selected to participate in a National Science Foundation workshop in China to discuss a foundation-supported ocean science education project and its possible application to outreach efforts by Chinese scientists and educators.

Katrina J. Edwards, professor of biological sciences and Earth sciences at USC College, has been recommended for an award of a $25 million National Science Foundation grant to establish the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations, a new science and technology center.

Professor Urbashi Mitra, of the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, an authority on wireless communications, is the lead principal investigator [in an effort] to find an effective way to use a network of autonomous vehicles in dynamic environments, using advanced sensing technology. Her novel effort is the first to tackle such a myriad of challenges in an underwater environment.

Andrea Hodge, Assistant Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, receives NSF CAREER Award. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization. Professor Hodge’s work: “Exploring Nanoscale Growth Twins for the Development of Grain Boundary Engineering at the Nanoscale,” garnered her the award.

The Fly Could Prove Fruitful for Good Health. USC College’s Michelle Arbeitman’s federal stimulus grant for neurobiology research in fruit flies will help scientists get closer to detecting genes that underlie social behavior. The work may lead to better understanding of neural diseases.

October 2009

Operations Research Expert Arrives from Berkeley. Dorit Simona Hochbaum: “A natural fit” with Viterbi School strengths. A world-renowned scholar with wide-ranging OR interests who has made major contributions to algorithm design and optimization will be the inaugural recipient of the Epstein Family Chair in the Daniel Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

September 2009

Viterbi School’s ISI Part of FutureGrid Test Bed. Ewa Deelman of the Information Sciences Institute and her group will participate in an ambitious NSF effort to develop and test novel approaches to parallel, grid, and cloud computing. By October 2009, faculty researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering have won $23.6 million in funding as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, including $1.6 million to Ewa Deelman for a new interface supporting grid computing.

WiSE 10th Anniversary Celebration and Speaker Series. In celebration of the 10th Anniversary of the USC Women in Science & Engineering Program, WiSE has partnered with departments in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences to highlight the many excellent women scientists and engineers visiting the USC campus this year. A broad range of disciplinary lectures featuring distinguished speakers will take place throughout the Fall and Spring semesters, with additional opportunities for faculty, students, and the university community to talk informally with guests about their training and professional development.

The WiSE Women of Science For the past decade, USC’s Women in Science and Engineering program has been working to make academic research and scholarship more hospitable to women scientists. The reason is simple: In today’s global economic competition, American research universities need all the brainpower they can get.